Prisons. Antigone: “2025 Leaves Us with Increasingly Dilapidated, Overcrowded and Inhumane Facilities”
January 20th, 2026
The end-of-2025 assessment published by the Antigone Association portrays an extremely critical picture of the Italian prison system, marked by structural overcrowding, material conditions often incompatible with minimum standards of human dignity, and a progressive erosion of the rehabilitative function of punishment.
In particular, the analysis highlights that the increase in the prison population cannot be attributed to a rise in crime – which, in the first half of 2025, actually recorded a decline – but rather to an increasingly widespread use of detention as the primary response to social marginalisation and personal vulnerability. This trend is compounded by a reduction in the effective capacity of prison facilities, aggravated by serious structural shortcomings (such as cells without showers, limited access to hot water, and insufficient spaces for social activities, work and education) as well as by a chronic shortage of staff, both among prison police officers and educational personnel.
The report also points to extremely high levels of psychological distress, evidenced by the widespread use of psychotropic medication, the high number of self-harm incidents, suicide attempts and disciplinary isolation measures, as well as by the particularly alarming figure of deaths in custody (238 in 2025, including 79 suicides). These data confirm the existence of a crisis that can no longer be described as merely temporary or emergency-driven.
Overall, the picture outlined by Antigone underscores the limits of penitentiary policies focused almost exclusively on increasing detention capacity and calls for urgent structural reforms capable of bringing the execution of sentences back within constitutional and conventional standards, including through a broader and more coherent use of alternatives to detention.
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